


eight seconds left in overtime

by cloudedhues



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Alternate Canon, Dreams, F/M, Hallucinations, Post-Canon, Speculated Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 10:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10718034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudedhues/pseuds/cloudedhues
Summary: Shinya dreams for a final time.A spiritual sequel tothis.





	eight seconds left in overtime

**Author's Note:**

> based on [talia's prompt](https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/shebasborg/121189807420)! i decided to post this here as well per [@elirengrey's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ElirenGrey/pseuds/ElirenGrey) request.

Sometimes in the darkest of nights, he would lie awake just like this and see her for a brief moment like a passing light at the corner of his eye. He could never get her to face him no matter where he turned. The sheer futility of it struck him somewhere deep, as if he was still a feral animal chained by the leg, never allowed to move too much for the sake of others. Always them and their fears of him and the idea of being someone with the audacity to pave their own judgement. To want for themselves. 

Sometimes, he was stricken with the feeling of what it was like to forget that, to lose grasp of what anchored him as she faded into a blur in his peripheral.

Sometimes, he’d remind himself that most of those fears were useless bullshit to an empty casket like his.

But like the law of gravity, like the Earth’s orbit around the sun, of stars living and dying and living and dying over and over, she would always return to him when he needed her the most. 

Just like now.

Because right now, he was dying.

And oddly enough—or, in fact, perhaps not—he couldn’t find it in him to give one single fuck that he was.

“Are you aware of how much of an idiot you are?”

He barked a laugh despite himself, the sound gurgling with the copper in his throat. It had been his first in awhile and it felt as painful and real as he remembered. Only she of all people would disappear for years, return to him so she could continue a conversation as if she had been gone for just five minutes.

Tsunemori Akane, wearing a sundress of all things, knelt down next to him in the blood-soaked concrete with neither the slightest grace nor care for her clothes. He squinted, the image of her sharpening into focus. Just like that, everything came back in a sudden influx: her eyes, that funny head of hers, how that one strand of hair near her ear never seemed to follow the others, the way her lips were perpetually geared to smile. Still twenty, still that headstrong, bright-eyed girl in his head, she was a vision—even without the surrounding carnage to accentuate how much his eyes always seemed to return to her by default. 

Right now, he was baffled at all those years he thought he would ever forget.

“I’m actually too aware of my idiocy, thank you very much,” he breathed out in quiet gasps.

“I thought I told you not to do anything reckless without someone to watch your back.” Her voice was light, accusatory only in the sense of berating a child for a minor infraction.

“Ah, well. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, right?”

He coughed roughly. Something wet slid down his chin and her face shifted into a more serious expression. “We should call for help.”

“Can’t. No one for miles. Just us corpses here.” He flicked his gaze briefly to his fellow figures lying askew some ways off, his last adversaries on this Earth cooling and giving into nature by the second.

She didn’t frown but he could see her face darken just a tad. “That’s not funny, Kougami-san.”

“Sorry…my jokes have been getting a bit rusty lately with no one to use them on.” He attempted to straighten himself against the metal beam behind him, grunting a bit from the sudden outpouring of blood from the cut in his stomach. His hand gripped tighter against the wound, staining it red all over again.

“You’re making it worse.”

“What—what more difference would that make now?” He tried to concentrate on breathing but as always, she was too distracting, too much demanding of his attention without the slightest indication of her awareness of the fact. Strangely, she had no response to his question and deigned to look awkward as she flitted her gaze somewhere else. Here he thought they’d never run out of things to talk about after being absent from each other for so long.

“You’re wearing that dress again,” he remarked a few minutes later for lack of anything better to say. He didn’t want to lose her. Not now.

She looked back at him and said mutely, “Despite the situation, black’s not a color that suits me very well.”

“Glad to know you’re not the morbid type.”

“Yes. I’m afraid that’s all you.” Finally— _finally_ —she granted him that smile of hers, and the throb in his stomach was but a vague sensation at the back of his mind.

“If you’re not going to dress for the occasion, then you should have at least brought me flowers. What kind of funeral is this anyway?” he joked, voice slurring.

She laughed, a sound that was pure and too real to be anything else, and it dragged something out from him a hidden coffin buried deep within. In a surreal instant, he could see flashes of memories unearthed as if he were looking through someone else’s faded album. Some ways off, an old man was pouring a drink for two. He could hear a sharp voice berating someone; the strumming of guitar; someone whooping with joy over his game; a woman laughing quietly in the background. 

And if he listened even closer, he could hear a chorus of them asking him what brought him back so late.

As if prompted by their question, his breath hitched unevenly into a shallower pace, black spots flickering like a light switch at the corner of his eyes. The pain felt distant but that didn’t negate its existence.

“Kougami-san?”

“Give me something,” he said suddenly.

“What?” Confusion rang in her tone.

“A happy ending.” His voice became urgent, harried as if he had run for miles. “Tell me about…about yours. Distract me. What have you been doing these past years?”

“I—I don’t know. You know I couldn’t tell you that even if I wanted to.”

“Then tell me what I want to hear.” 

For a long, dragging moment, there was no response and the realization he might have lost her all over again cut him more than the gash stealing him away. He was the type to default to facts, to deductions, to what could be proven and what couldn’t. So he couldn’t very well say he believed in a god—especially a benevolent one at that. But at this moment, he would be lying if he said he wouldn’t willingly go hands and knees to anyone out there listening to anchor her here next to him for just a few minutes longer.

“I got out,” she started quietly. Something heavy lodged in his chest but he felt light. Lighter than he had in years.

“Yeah?”

“I got out of Sibyl. Ran away,” she said to him. “Wandered around for a bit but then…”

He forced a pained nod, prompted her silently to continue.

“I found you again.” Something like longing rode at the back of her voice. “I caught you just like I promised.

“And we kept together after that—just the two of us. There was a small town, far away from Sibyl—you know that old place you found three years ago? Yes, that one. We stayed there for a good while. Kept house. You proposed a month after and we were married outside by the garden we kept. One of our neighbors, an old man, used to be an officiator for that sort of thing. We even found a stray and you named him after Ginoza. I’m sure he would have liked that, heh. ”

She chuckled quietly as if it were an occurrence that happened yesterday. 

“We had a son a year later. I wanted to name him after Masaoka-san but you said that he would never want that. He would have wanted us to name him something new, so we could bring him into the world unburdened by namesakes and memories of the past.”

“What did we name him?”

“I don’t know,” she spoke wistfully. “Hopefully something nice. Something happy. We weren’t too original with names, were we?”

“And the rest?” he struggled to speak out.

“It was quiet. Long and peaceful. Every moment was like a dream. Like constantly falling asleep and waking up.”

He felt heavy, as if the ground was pulling him further. _Just a little longer_ , he urged. _Just a little longer_.

“The ending….how did the ending go?” he rasped.

“We went together in our sleep,” she told him slowly. “Just like how we wanted.”

A sudden, childish fright took hold of him then. But it was not from the prospect of dying. Death did not frighten him; he had brushed shoulders with it too much to be afraid of such things. But the thought of walking away from her again, of breaking his promise with not even a letter to leave this time, a last word to mark him for her rattled his core. Some desperate residual energy caused his left hand to crawl towards hers, frantic to feel her solid just once for a final time. She met him halfway, her hand like the air on his. She smiled then, gentle and apologetic—the last thing he saw before his eyes closed on their own, letting tiredness win before he even realized. 

He no longer felt much of the pain. His fingers were numb, scarcely keeping touch with the pulse leaving him.

“Akane…?” he slurred a few moments afterwards.

“I’m here,” she promised. “I’ll stay for as long as I can.”

“Don’t…” _Don’t make promises you can’t keep_.

“Did you like my ending?”

He didn’t say anything. She would already know his answer.

“It was a good dream though, wasn’t it?” Her voice was becoming distant now as if she was talking to no one. Like he was already walking away. “But dreams have to end some time, right?”

A heartbroken sort of happiness bolstered his slowing heart despite everything. Barely above a breath, he gave her a goodbye twenty years overdue. It was the only promise he had never broken in all he’d known her. 

A promise he could count with three fingers, three words as perennial as a prayer whispered over and over by a million worshipping lips. 

And so she whispered it back to him like a secret.

_Good night then, Akane._

A sad smile slipped into her voice. “It’s time to wake up now, Shinya.”

So he did.


End file.
